Southern Sudanese officials have offered to mediate between the Ugandan government and rebels who have been fighting it for 19 years, a Sudanese official said on Thursday. "We are in the process of bringing the two together," Riek Machar, vice president of the autonomous southern Sudan government, said in a telephone interview from the southern capital, Juba. Ugandan officials, however, said they doubted the rebel Lord's Resistance Army, a brutal force with no clear political agenda, was ready for peace talks. Read more at South Africa's Independent Online.

Archbishop John Baptist Odama has appealed to the International Criminal Court to reconsider the issue of arrest warrants against Joseph Kony and four other LRA commanders accusing them of crimes against humanity. Odama, a long-time peace advocate in northern Uganda and chairman of the Acholi Religious Leaders' Peace Initiative, said that the warrants were hindering government negotiator Betty Bigombe's attempts to mediate a peaceful end to the LRA rebellion.

Odama's comments followed a series of meetings between ICC officials and local leaders about how to best go about implementing the ICC strategy for arresting and trying the five indicted LRA leaders. The ICC issued the warrants last October. Read more at The New Vision.